David Petraeus Quotes

Well, one thing that has changed is the number of people killed by terrorists in Pakistan. Civilians killed has gone down really quite dramatically. There was a newspaper article here about a month ago that got big headlines which said that civilian deaths from terrorism were down something like 80 percent or 90 percent from their peak of two or three years ago.

Our aim is always to minimise casualties and to separate a hardline Taliban from those who have been caught up in the insurgency.

My thinking was taught to tribes in South Africa like the Zulus and Xhosas. At the time there were about 210 fights breaking out among them every month, but after they listened to my lessons, this fell to just four.

Sure we won the war, but the peace we’re losing badly.

We’re not going to need as many people to do peacekeeping as we needed to fight the war.

Some people say that with Oslo, hundreds of people were killed. But without Oslo there would have been thousands of people killed.

The initial [Iraq] war was won in about 6 weeks, but the peace was lost soon thereafter.

While everyone of all political stripes are admitting that the surge is working and dramatically reducing the level of bloodshed in Iraq, Obama managed to complain that the Iraqis aren't spending as much in rebuilding their own country as a result of the surge.

Today, the worst conflicts, the most deep-rooted violence, and those likely to emerge in the coming years are due to disparities in development.

Voting against the resolution authorizing the use of military force in Iraq was one of my proudest moments as a senator. It is long past time to close this tragic chapter in American history.

[Hillary Clinton] was saying, "We never going to do anything in Iraq, we're not going to do anything in Syria." Enemies, do whatever you want. Continue the largest humanitarian crisis, 7 million people displaced refugees. Do all this. We're not going to do anything. That is the type of stuff that is been happening for the past 7 1/2 years under President [Barack] Obama.

Any outside use of military power would at best furnish a temporary respite from the processes that we see playing out. We know that because we have been through all this before. The "surge" of several years ago was supposed to provide space and time for Iraqi political interests to work out their differences. 30,000 additional U.S. troops failed to lead to any working out of those differences, and the outcome is the mess we see today.

Past violence is detrimental to our present action, and it is not in the name of principles that we denounce it, but in the name of efficiency.

With the war in Iraq, he [Dalai Lama] feels that the causes of that lie maybe hundreds of years ago, and he says, "What we do now may have consequences far into the future that we will never see."

Strictly speaking, no activity and no industry is possible without a certain amount of violence, no matter how little. Even the very process of living is impossible without a certain amount of violence. What we have to do is to minimize it to the greatest extent possible.

Peace cannot be built on exclusion. That has been the price of the past 30 years.

This year marks 20 years since the Rwandan genocide -- the world's greatest humanitarian tragedy of the late 20th century. The international community had pledged 'never again' in the aftermath of the genocide in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s. Yet, we are witnessing today a different type of humanitarian disaster unfolding in Syria and Iraq.

Everyone believes that the prospect for a civil war has diminished significantly over the past several days. All the mainstream leaders of Iraq believe that civil war must be avoided. It's very positive that they are all saying it.

With respect to Syria, we are going to continue to work as we have over the last five, six years to push towards a political transition and settlement.

No one is talking about occupying Iraq for five to ten years.

Of the past 3,400 years, humans have been entirely at peace for 268 of them, or just 8 percent of recorded history.

Extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different - and perhaps barren - outcome.

Look at the results of regime change in Iraq. You can't possibly claim that it was successful.

I wish I could attribute the absence of any conventional Arab offensive in the last 20 years to a change of political climate or a willingness to abide by past accords. But unfortunately it is more likely that the Egyptians or Syrians concluded that the next time their tanks headed to Tel Aviv, there was nothing stopping the counterassaults from ending up in downtown Cairo or Damascus.

I would need to see changes in the Iraq governance. Otherwise I don't think strikes are going to have any impact and could be very well counterproductive.